COMMENTS & CURIOSITIES -- peter buffa

You’ve probably heard of them. Maybe not. The Darwin Awards. Fascinating

stuff. There are a number of organizations that claim to be the official

arbiters of the annual Darwin Awards, but it’s really a constantly

evolving list of stories about people who have removed themselves from

this imperfect world through acts of unimaginable stupidity.

Hopefully, the connection between people who go on to their greater

reward in this way and Darwinism is obvious, because we are on sensitive

ground here and I’m not about to explain it.

I can’t imagine why, but I get a lot of e-mail, calls, etc., about new

contenders for Darwin Awards. The relative incidence of

death-by-stupidity has become so intense in recent months that, as Willie

Lowman’s wife in “Death of a Salesman” said, “... attention must be

paid.”

As you know, last Sunday was the day we set our clocks back. You know,

“Spring forward, Fall back.” I love those pithy sayings. It’s what I

remember best from eight years of Catholic grade school. Know how to

remember when to use “desert” and when to use “dessert?” You always want

two servings of dessert, so it has two S’s. Know when to use “principle”

versus “principal?” The principal is your pal. Get it? “Principal ...

pal?” I got a million of those. You’re lucky I only get so much space.

Where were we? Ah, yes. The Darwin Awards.

You may recall a recent news item about a pair of car bombings in two

Israeli cities. Incredibly, the explosives in each car detonated

prematurely, killing all the terrorists, save one, far from their

intended targets and, fortunately, minimizing the mayhem they had

planned. Only recently were the details of what really happened released.

Apparently, Israel switches between daylight savings and standard time as

do we, but its neighbors do not. The bombers crossed the Israeli border

the day before their planned reign of terror. At some point, they noticed

the time difference and adjusted their watches accordingly.

Unfortunately for them, no one remembered that the timing devices on the

car bombs were now set an hour later than the time on their watches. When

each big bang turned into a big dud, the 60-minute error was just long

enough for the terrorists to climb back into their cars and travel far

from the center of each city, thinking they were on their way back home

which, I suppose you could say, they were. Result? Instant Darwin Award

winners.

In August, a German man wanted to get a good view of a near-total eclipse

of the sun, which, he calculated, would occur during a business trip he

was making on the autobahn. To be safe, he purchased a pair of

near-opaque glasses, with which to view the celestial pyrotechnics.

Unfortunately, instead of pulling off the road, he decided to observe the

solar eclipse through, appropriately enough, the sunroof. When he glanced

back to the road, he discovered, sadly, that opaque glasses are good for

watching eclipses but bad for driving -- especially at the average

autobahn speed of Mach 2. It was a spectacular single-car crash, and a

well-deserved Darwin Award winner.

In Japan, a current fashion craze for young women is outlandish hair

colors, micro-minis and outrageously tall platform shoes -- anywhere

between six and 12 inches tall. Last Monday, a 25-year-old woman was

killed when she drove into a wall at high speed because her platform shoe

became wedged between the brake pedal and the accelerator, making it

impossible to stop.

It was, in fact, the second Darwin-eligible death this year directly

attributable to platform shoes. The story jogged my memory and sent me

scurrying to my files to find a list of excuses extracted from police

reports of traffic accidents around the country:

1. “The pedestrian was uncertain which way to run, so I ran over him.”

2. “The other car collided with mine without giving warning of its

intention.”

3. “A truck backed through my windshield into my wife’s face.”

4. “My car was legally parked when it backed into the other vehicle.”

5. “A pedestrian hit me, then went under my car.”

6. “I was attempting to kill a fly when I drove into the telephone pole.”

It’s OK, bud. At least you weren’t watching an eclipse.

My sentimental favorite was a recent Darwin Award candidate who was

ultimately disqualified because no one actually died.

In the Midwest, a woman came home, walked into her kitchen and found her

husband clutching a counter top, shaking violently and jerking his head

back and forth -- apparently being electrocuted before her eyes. She had

the presence of mind not to touch him, charged outside and found a piece

of 2-by-4 beside the kitchen door. She ran back to the kitchen, reared

back and whacked her still convulsing husband as hard as she could,

knocking him to the floor and breaking his wrist in the process.

Only then was he able to rip the headphones from his ears and scream,

“What the [expletive] are you doing?” Thinking he was home alone, he had

strapped on his headphones, cranked up his favorite track on his mini-CD

player, and got a little carried away with his dancing.

The story may not have earned a Darwin Award, but I think it’s a valuable

insight into the special way of communicating that every long-term

relationship needs to survive. I gotta go.

* PETER BUFFA is a former Costa Mesa mayor. His column runs Fridays. He

can be reached via e-mail at o7 [email protected] .